Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB vs Radeon HD 5750 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this particular card. It features 720(144x5) SPUs along with 36 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5750 512MB		86 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 164 Watts (191%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5750 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 53504 (73%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is much (approximately 98%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5750 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		25200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB is superior to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5750 512MB		11200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (79%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.